Surgery

Please note that this section contains my personal notes from my readings on this topic.

———————————————————————————————————-

The mechanical interventions that we use in this country are much less effective than most people realize. Bypass surgery has become particularly popular. As many as 380,000 bypass operations were performed in 1990, meaning that about 1 out of 750 Americans underwent this extreme surgery…

More than one of every fifty elective patients will die because of complications during the $46,000 procedure. Other side effects include heart attack, respiratory complications, bleeding complications, infection, high blood pressure and stroke. When the vessels around the heart are clamped shut during the operation, plaque breaks off of the inner walls. Blood then carries this debris to the brain, where it causes numerous “mini” strokes. Researchers have compared the intellectual capabilities of patients before and after the operation, and found that a stunning 79% of patients “showed impairment in some aspect of cognitive function” seven days after the operation.

Why do we put ourselves through this? The most pronounced benefit of this procedure is relief of angina, or chest pain. About 70-80% of patients who undergo bypass surgery remain free of this crippling chest pain for one year. But this benefit doesn’t last. Within three years of the operation, up to one-third of patients will suffer from chest pain again. Within ten years half of the bypass patients will have died, had a heart attack or had their chest pain return. Long-term studies indicate that only certain subsets of heart disease patients live longer because of their bypass operation. Furthermore, these studies demonstrate that those patients who undergo bypass operation do not have fewer heart attacks than those who do not have surgery.

Angioplasty is a similar story. The procedure is expensive and carries significant risks…

So, upon closer examination, our seemingly beneficent mechanical advanced in the field of heart disease are severely disappointing. Bypass surgery and angioplasty do not address the cause of heart disease, prevent heart attacks or extend the lives of any but the sickest heart disease patients.